Embodiments of the present invention relate to a method of operating a data processing system and, more particularly, to message handling in a data processing system.
Enterprise service bus (ESB) is a software architecture model used for designing and implementing the interaction and communication between mutually interacting software applications in service oriented architecture. As a software architecture model for distributed computing, it is a variant of the more general client-server software architecture model and provides a message oriented design for communication and interaction between applications. Its primary use is in the integration of heterogeneous computing systems.
Existing ESB implementations allow for two-way operations. A simple example would be mediating a message on a request flow before initiating an invocation of a given service, and then providing a response flow to mediate the response from the given service back to the client application. It is not uncommon to have a response flow that does not perform any enrichment, transformation, mediation or auditing, but simply pushes the response back to the client application without performing any actions, which is inefficient both in processor and network utilization for the ESB.